Page 66 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

The senses of presenting such an inner life are several. The

suggestion of passionate, subjective feeling is of course perfectly

apt to the context, of intense monastic devotion if not the

quintessential mystical event of the Stigmatisation itself. It is also

well matched to the insistent and richly differentiated naturalism

of the scene. Subjective and pervasive feeling that seems to lie

beyond the description of the saint’s appearance, indeed that stands

in sharp contrast to intense materiality, can also be seen as the

expressive equivalent of the immanence divinity which is implicit

in the searching and meticulous realism. The two meet and

reinforce each other beneath the surface of things. The essential

spiritual transaction occurs beyond the senses. The painting

renders a mystical experience, but with its workings invisible,

existential, and thus admitted by Castiglione’s style. This

dimension is one more fundamental departure from Osimo: the

externalised, ecstatic vision of the upper part of the altarpiece has

not been eliminated so much as internalised. The saint’s outward

attention has been turned inward. In this sense the painting implies

at the very least a wrestling with that new aesthetic, with the High

Baroque of Cortona and Bernini, and if not a rejection, a nearly

complete internalising of its effects.The apparition has vanished,

her brilliant radiance and impossible saturation dissipated, leaving Fig.23 GIOACCHINO ASSERETO

the glow of an overcast sun in a faint turquoise sky, a bright bank The Angelic Consolation of St Francis, Palazzo Bianco,
of cloud, and a warm patch of morning sun that could each pass as Genoa.

natural, with a lingering hint in their inconsistent sources.

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No facts are known about the creation of the Saint Francis or about its provenance prior to the 1970s.
Much, however, can be surmised about its circumstances. The obvious derivation from the Osimo
altarpiece and such thorough reconsideration of its style would indicate that the present painting was executed
shortly after, while the representational issues were live and thoughts fresh. Indeed, the two paintings can be

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